Article: Introducing Creative Bewitchment
Introducing Creative Bewitchment
The Call
I was 13, bored and squirming in my chair from the incessant itch of my navy blue stockings, when I saw a witch for the first time. She didn’t use that word when she introduced herself as our new student art teacher, but I knew in my gut that’s what she was.
It wasn’t her half-shaved head that gave it away, so remarkable in a room full of tartan-clad school girls. It was in how she spoke, as if her very presence could coax reality into a more interesting shape than it took before.
I can’t remember her name, but every once in a while she’ll still cross my mind: a reminder of when I first understood that people could be portals.
These past few years, I’ve found myself longing for such doorways in the voices of others. Scrolling through social media, I would see thumbnail after thumbnail:
How To Become a Full-Time Artist!
5 Content Ideas That Will Triple Your Art Sales!
Why You’re Not Growing Online!
. . .and so forth.
Everyone seemed to be discussing how to become a professional artist, with varying degrees of credibility. Few were telling stories about what it means to live in the skin of a creative—the trials and gifts that come from being strange-hearted.
I wanted to consume something different, and the hunger made me irritable. Rather than feeding it by critiquing others, I got writing. The result is Creative Bewitchment.
My hope is that this ongoing series of essays acts as an open gateway. When you get tired of being told what to do in 10 easy steps, you can open your podcast app or head to elisavita.com, and enter the place where our two paths meet.
Together we’ll wander: past the old cemetery, over the ravine and its yelping coyotes, then—finally—into the thicket.
A Shift in Perspective
“Thicket.”
It’s a word I’ve been chewing on for years. Say it enough times and you’ll conjure up the image of a small cluster of trees. Speeding past in my beat-up minivan, it would have seemed quaint, unremarkable. But if I were to trudge to its very centre, the cluster might have felt like a vast wood.
“Thicket. Thicket. Thick of it.”
What if, for once, we spoke from the heart of the creative process, rather than trying to light the way out tidily? What if we relished the murkiness of art-making, celebrating confusion as much as we do clarity?
Digital content is meant to be explicit. To strike through the noise and catch your attention. Art’s call can be quieter: a siren song you barely make out over the breathing tide, salty air that coats your lungs.
I’m no purist when it comes to marketing creative work. You won’t catch me clutching my pearls, lamenting that selling art soils it. Promoting an exhibition, a book of poems, or an album online is a necessary part of bringing your vision forth.
But you need to start from the core of your work. If you yourself can’t feel the beating pulse of your creations, then you’re not seducing an audience with your vision. You’re just shouting at them.
Your task, as an artist, is to bewitch.
In fairy tales, characters are often transformed to mirror their hidden selves; a handsy suitor might be turned into a pig, a bear into a prince. Likewise, artists must recognize the internal and make it external, so that even a cluster of pines by the bus stop is revealed to be something much stranger and more magical—the very thick of it.
The Artist, The Witch, and the Strangeling
I was in fourth grade when I first came across the concept of a changeling, thanks to a series of children’s books. It struck a chord in me: the image of an infant switched at birth, a fairy imposter in its place. As the changeling grew, it might not know it was a fraud...but there would be signs.
As an adult, I know that the feeling of being alien is more common than not, at least in creative circles. A lot of those strange children have grown up to be artists, whether in the stolen time between waking and dreaming, building worlds in their mind, or, like me, dedicating the majority of their days to their craft.
I see artists as witches, hedge dwellers. They stand between worlds, shepherding ideas out of the ether and giving them tangible form. What was once a fleeting thought becomes a strange creature, emerging through the veil.
Artists know that creation is a grisly endeavour. That the fat must be trimmed, the flesh parsed through until some secret is divined from the curve of bone. When they’re done, they put the beast back together, and it’s somehow more lively than it was before. More real.
Magic, as far as I’m concerned, is the poetry of matter. A witch is someone who not only listens for this poetry but makes a practice of rearranging its verses to achieve new rhythms.
Witches foster deep connections with both the seen and unseen world, and engage in ritual as a means of giving the ethereal physical form. Ritual may also serve the purpose of rooting the witch more deeply within the material and immaterial ecosystems that surround them.
In this sense, witchcraft isn’t a practice of escapism (or lunacy) but rather extreme connectivity.
When I speak about witchcraft, I’m not using it as a metaphor or as a strict label. Rather, it’s shorthand for a magical worldview.
During my phase of disenchantment with content geared toward artists, I realized that nothing I wrote about creativity was free of a magical influence. I worried that the topic was too niche. What if I seemed crazy? Worse yet, what if it all read as navel-gazing?
Then, I remembered: I may be strange, but I’m not special.
A Mythic Framework
Scrolling through Instagram this week, I came across an account that excited me for the first time in ages. It featured haunting 2D animations, Ghibli-esque and 80s-inspired.
In the bio, was written: “Original work.”
Exploring the feed, I was filled with both familiarity and wonder. Then I saw it, buried in the comments: the creator’s admission that it was all AI.
I was shaken. It was the first time I had mistaken artificially generated content as human-made. Eventually, would there really be no distinction between prompted and original artwork?
As far as an audience is concerned, might I become obsolete?
Maybe.
This is why, more than ever, we can’t just focus on the final step of creation: the moment when our work is appraised. We are transformed by the entirety of the creative process.
Online, some witches assure the efficacy of their spells just like some artists guarantee the efficacy of their business courses.
Meanwhile, those using AI to generate artwork are assured of a result. They might not have full control, but they know that prompting the software will generate something.
The people pitching love spells and outdated business strategies cheat others. The AI prompters cheat themselves.
Simply speaking is not enough. The world cannot be prompted into submission. Who we are, the actions we take, and the energy we exude have as great an effect as what we say.
Creativity and witchcraft are the antithesis to quick-fix solutions because both are rooted in our humanity: that fallible playground of spirit, sweat, and sinew.
Through the three pillars of Creative Bewitchment—archetypes and astrology, aesthetics as spellwork, and practical folklore—creatives can become truly embodied, even as our professional landscapes grow less so.
Archetypes & Astrology
In addition to spotting my first witch at 13, in the form of our new student art teacher, I was assigned a retelling of Homer's The Odyssey in English class. This is how I first encountered Circe, one of mythology’s most famous enchantresses. I simultaneously adored and was envious of her.
What must it be like, I wondered, to be strange in a way that elicited respect and fascination rather than ridicule?
While I didn’t have the answer as a newly minted teenager, the sorceress and her enchanted island stayed with me. The overarching isolation I felt since childhood became condensed in her image.
Over time, as my self-consciousness gave way to the tentative but growing sureness of early adulthood, I realized that cultivating my own island could be made possible through art.
The perception of others was irrelevant. Through creativity, I could manifest a clawed and taloned body of work to shelter me, so that in a sea of indifference and occasional judgement, I would be just fine.
In this way, the witch or enchantress has acted as a clarifying archetype throughout my teenage years and early adulthood.
I’m interested in archetypes in an artistic capacity, not necessarily a Jungian one. I use the term informally, as many in esoteric and creative spaces do. My personal understanding of an archetype is that of universal energies recurring in various guises.
These energies can feel overwhelming until we condense them into an image or symbol. Doing so makes the archetype’s meaning clearer. It gives us something to grab onto.
Creatives inevitably have to work with symbolism. Whether you’re a painter, poet, or musician, you’re taking a core experience or impulse and transmuting it into something more specific: a painting, a poem, or a song.
Magic, like much of art, is a symbolic language. It allows us to take concepts that might feel deeply pressing in our own lives and whittle them down to a manageable size. A candle, incense, or charm becomes a stand-in for something else.
For creatives, something like astrology—a system largely composed of archetypes and symbols—can be revealing. When we use the astrological archetypes found in our birth charts as a means of self-exploration, we begin to contextualize our artistic practices. Suddenly, it feels less like life is randomly happening to us, and more like we’re co-creating with it.
Aesthetics as Spellwork
I’ve always been drawn to the aesthetics of devotion, shaped by the distinctly Catholic glamour that adorned my grandmother’s home. Flickering candles lit the halos of framed saints, her rings glinting as she deftly worked the sewing machine.
Compared to the pared-back Protestantism—branded as good taste—that I would later be exposed to, the Italian immigrants I knew were gloriously flashy. Their jewelry was shorthand for a kind of striving.
After a day at the construction site, when the men of the community would descend upon their homes like a threat and their goodwill inevitably gave way to machismo, at least these relics remained: gold chains and crucifixes, a cherub gazing wistfully from a pendant.
The value of these objects didn’t come from their excess. They signalled the possibility of something under the surface, seldom seen but sometimes implied: love, maybe even peace.
Growing up, I instinctively knew that the material was spiritual. The objects you surround yourself with have the power to communicate something integral. They can provide visual clues about who you are, who you want to be, and what you care about.
While colloquially, the term “aesthetic” is used to refer to something visual, it encompasses the sensory world overall. This means that aesthetic principles affect all artists, regardless of their respective mediums.
As such, I believe every creative could benefit from honing their personal aesthetic. This will affect everything from your wardrobe to the books you read to the spaces you occupy. The goal isn’t arbitrary curation or unchecked consumerism; it’s discernment.
When our internal and external worlds are aligned, magic happens. By exploring aesthetic principles together, we’ll determine how you can create that magic for yourself.
Practical Folklore
It was a Sunday lunch like any other when I realized that my grandfather believes in witches—the monstrous kind, now banished to storybooks. I paused and stared at him, fork limp in mid-air.
“What?”
He repeated himself, “A witch tried to kidnap me.”
My grandfather speaks like boulders grinding underground: deep and muffled. Even his dialect is wet earth, the final vowel of one word bleeding into the next. At first, I thought I misunderstood. But no, I had heard right.
“Like, you saw a witch, Nonno?”
“No, I was an infant. My mom saw her.”
“What did she look like?”
He shrugged, “Boh. Nothing. She took the shape of wind.”
I could picture her, the great-grandmother I never met, feeling the gale through the window and believing that behind its touch was the hand of Evil. Was it post-partum anxiety, or something else entirely?
I’ll never know.
What I do know is this: folklore isn’t just a repository of old stories—it’s a framework of perception. Through myth and folklore, multiple truths can exist simultaneously. The witch is both present and absent, seen and unseen.
For artists, embracing this divergent thinking is vital. The creative process often asks us to inhabit two states at once: the tangible and the imagined, the calculated and the intuitive.
Together, we’ll explore these contradictions.
My Promise to You
For artists striving to connect with their inner magic amidst the demands of modern life, Creative Bewitchment will act as an invitation to wander. Together, we’ll dampen the noise of quick fixes and easy formulas and amplify the complex, often contradictory experience of living as a creative.
By exploring archetypes and astrology, aesthetics as spellwork, and the timeless wisdom of folklore, we’ll forge our own paths toward deeper embodiment.
As this series grows, may it become a companion and catalyst on your journey—kindling curiosity, grounding your practice, and reminding you that, no matter how solitary the way forward feels, you are part of a long lineage of folk who wield magic through art.